115 Aspirational Districts

Launched by the Hon’ble PM in January, the ‘Transformation of Aspirational Districts’ programme aims to quickly and effectively transform these districts. The broad contours of the programme are Convergence (of Central & State Schemes), Collaboration (of Central, State level ‘Prabhari’ Officers & District Collectors), and Competition among districts driven by a mass Movement. With States as the main drivers, this program will focus on the strength of each district, identify low-hanging fruits for immediate improvement, measure progress, and rank districts.

The Government is committed to raising the living standards of its citizens and ensuring inclusive growth for all – “Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas”. To enable optimum utilization of their potential, this program focusses closely on improving people’s ability to participate fully in the burgeoning economy. Health & Nutrition, Education, Agriculture & Water Resources, Financial Inclusion & Skill Development, and Basic Infrastructure are this programme’s core areas of focus. After several rounds of consultations with various stakeholders, 49 key performance indicators have been chosen to measure progress of the districts. Districts are prodded and encouraged to first catch-up with the best district within their state, and subsequently aspire to become one of the best in the country, by competing with, and learning from others in the spirit of competitive & cooperative federalism.

NITI Aayog in partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh has created a dashboard for monitoring the real-time progress of the districts. District Information Officers underwent training on March 23, 2018 on how to enter data to the dashboard and generate MIS (Management Information System) reports. On April 1, 2018 districts will start entering data. Beginning May 2018, districts will be ranked based on progress made (‘delta ranking’) on a real-time basis. The dashboard will be open to the public to monitor the progress of the aspirational districts.

115 Awarness Programme

A mobile 115 Aspirational Districts programme places a keen emphasis on raising awareness . In order to educate communities and make them responsible for their health , awareness sessions are held on a weekly basis. These sessions are highly interactive and relevant IEC (Information, Education & Communication ) material gets distributed among people in their respective regional languages Each topic is discussed repeatedly using innovative methods and it has been observed that the level of retention improves over time. Moreover , the message are also chosen in sync with situational and seasonal requirements of the communities . Case in points: diarrhoea-related messages during the monsoons.

According to Dasra report , 70% of Indian tribal communities depend on governmental healthcare services. In such a backdrop , the inability to access such services deprives them of their fundamental rights and limits the impact of public healthcare interventions.

Take the instance of 15 year-old Laxmipriya form the village Hinshirda. Angual District, Odisha who was suffering from malaria. In the absences of public healthcare facilities, her poverty-stricken family resorted to the services of hacks and and charlatans (Totka, Jhaad phook , among others ). Seeing this, The Mobile 115 Aspirational District team visited her village and gave her the requisite medication and in the process raised yhe awareness levels of the other villagers.

Through its 115 Vans, The mobile 115 Aspirational Districts program is working on busting these age-old myths so that people can live dignified healthy and meaningful lives

Public Health-Care Infrastructure In India

India has a mixed health-care system, inclusive of public and private health care service providers .However , most of the private health-care providers are concentrated in urban India, providing secondary and tertiary care health-care services. The public health-care infrastructure in rural areas has been developed as a three-tier system based on the population norms and described below . The Urban health system is discussed in the article on urban Newborn.

Interactive Forum on Indian Economy (IFIE) Foundation is a national , non-for-profit organization engaged in social service and human welfare activities. It’s programmes have made perceptible change in it’s areas of operations to the lives of the underprivileged .